Over the past decade, Cincinnati, OH, also known as the Queen City has been riddled with gun violence. Definitely not on the same level as some larger cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago or Washington D.C., but the epidemic has been no less traumatic. This rash of gun violence which has infested the Queen City threatens to hinder a number of redevelopment efforts which our city is proud to be part of; The Banks, redevelopment in Over-the-Rhine and also our Uptown neighborhood. This article is a call to for residents and other stake holders to pay attention and re institute an open dialogue on how gun violence effects our community.
We need to look no further than to recent events in our nation’s history to exemplify how destructive gun violence is to the fabric which holds our society together. The young girl killed in Chicago days after attending Mr. Obama’s second inauguration, the atrocity which occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary and just a few weeks ago where a mentally challenged individual took the innocent lives of so many at the navel shipyard in Washington D.C.
Ohio is ranked 39th in gun violence; according to the National Center for Injury Prevention & Control, one of the centers of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and in 2007 saw the taken lives of 31,224 Americans to gun violence. StateMaster.com goes on to detail that just over half of the violence reported in the state is gun related.
We need to take heed to the horrifying statistics and begin to have an open and honest discussion on why gun violence is so prevalent here in the United States and what can we begin to do here in our city of Cincinnati to curb this epidemic plaguing our neighborhoods.
There is another side to this argument. Opponents of gun control have longed lobbied the fact that increased gun control will never stop the people who are creating the crimes, and differ back to the Constitution that carrying a firearm is one of our rights as a United States citizen.
In response to a statement written by our former president, James Madison, where he emphatically suggests that when developing a well ran government, you have to give the government enough power to oversee, John Jay explained, “Nothing is more certain than the indispensable necessity of government, and it is equally undeniable, that whenever and however it is instituted, the people must cede to it some of their natural rights in order to vest it with requisite powers.”
Cincinnati resident and play write Herb DuVal has written a play called Broken Weapons.
Broken Weapons is a play about fear-fear of harm, fear of the unknown, fear of change, and of one’s own ability to manage both fear and the instruments of that fear.
Mr. DuVal is trying to raise $2,000 to bring this play to life and show how guns and gun violence effects lives in a negative way. If you believe in this play and want to see it succeed please visit his crowd funding site.
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/broken-weapons/x/4808389
The play is scheduled for Nov 1, 2013 at 7pm at the Wyoming Civic Center,
If you are in the same mind as I am, please take a few minutes out of your busy day and visit the above site. Putting on a play about gun violence is not the only answer to solving the problem stated in this article, but it is one of the first steps.